


Remarkable Behaviors

by Synthesis



Category: Ghost in the Shell (Anime & Manga), ドミニオン | Dominion: Tank Police
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-16
Updated: 2020-08-15
Packaged: 2021-03-06 03:15:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 13,425
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25926502
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Synthesis/pseuds/Synthesis
Summary: Before the Third World War, three doctors commissioned to create a bio-gynoid for Locus-Solus do too a good a job. An origin story for Niihama's Puma Sisters, Anna and Uni, the two most expensive, and most dangerous, bio-mechanical "love dolls" ever built.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> And this place,  
> That which they call "Earth"…  
> Was of a form most rare and mysterious…  
> Especially those surface projections,  
> "Human" by label,  
> Which engaged ceaselessly in the most remarkable behaviors.
> 
> \- Excerpt from The Diaries of Greenpeace Crolis

**Zheng: Our favorite pervert.** That's what the sheet of paper taped to the door of the Okayama laboratory where he worked read, in flowery, feminine script done in pink marker, surrounded by a number of elaborately drawn roses. He forced his way through crowd lingering outside his lab, chortling at the sight, before ripping the paper off.

"Ah hah! Very funny! Don't you people have some work to do?" he asked suspiciously, before crumpling it into a ball and throwing it at someone else's face. He then unlocked the swinging glass doors with his cyberbrain ghost key. The peanut gallery had a laugh at his exasperation before the doors shut airtight.

"Good morning, Zheng."

Waiting by the airlock, Dr. Zheng's junior partner, Dr. Vasilyev, was already dressed in his cleanroom suit, a sterile suit with long white gloves and a breathing apparatus.

"Good morning, Mikhail Sergeyovich," he replied dutifully, while he pulled of his white coat and tie and hastily changed himself. "Is Yoko already in?"

"Definitely so. I'm starting to think she didn't even leave for the night."

Zheng affixed his breathing apparatus around his neck, letting the plastic mask hang open. "Did you hear about that flight, Misha?"

"The one that went down east of Aomori, the Boeing? God, how tragic. Have they confirmed any other survivors?"

"No, just those two children," Zheng offered somberly. "The Russian government announced they'd do a general sweep alongside the Japanese MSDF. Don't you have a nephew in the Russian Pacific Fleet?" he asked, turning his back so that the other man could flip on his air re-breather kit.

Vasilyev nodded. "The Red Banner Pacific Fleet, my sister's boy. He's a submariner, but I doubt his ship would get called out as part of the search," he explained, while patting the other's shoulder after checking the small display on his backpack. "Have they determined a cause yet?"

"Oh, I suspect they won't for some time. They're still looking for any other survivors, even if that's a long shot. But the word on the 'Net is that it was a mechanical failure with one of the turbines."

"Very strange," the other replied as the two men checked their kits one last time before entering the airlock. A short sterilizing and anti-static bath spray bath later, and they crossed into the laboratory proper, where a younger woman in the same gear was waiting a table.

"Good morning, Dr. Matsumoto," Zheng said through his air mask, getting her attention.

She looked up briefly from the computer she was working at. "'Morning Zheng, Vasilyev."

"'Morning Matsumoto," Vasilyev said before sitting behind another small desk. "Everything in working order?"

She looked up and pointed at the device next to her. "The nanotech film layer is still weird. I don't like the variances we're seeing."

Vasilyev passed Matsumoto and peered at it inquisitively. "We may need to replace it."

"It works fine, it's the software that's the problem. Ever since that most recent update, the fiber optic film samples I've been putting out seem worse than before, but it's not the materials either."

"Call Ota, he knows the supplier personally. Can we undo the update?"

"No, I get a system error when I try. I do cyberbodies, not computers." She put on a pair of high-powered magnifiers, wearing them like bulky goggles. "There's a difference, you know."

"Of course," Zheng muttered with a sigh. Matsumoto was much younger than either of them, a graduate student with just one year left for her PhD Biochemistry for Cybernetics at Tokodai. She had roughly the same level of cyberization as both of her colleagues, but her youth made her hands steadier and more reliable, or so they believed.

A chime on the wall rang and Vasilyev grabbed the nearby handset. "Lab Three here, go ahead." He paused. "I'll be right out," he said before rushing out of the lab.

"What was that about?'

"Maybe the contract?" Zheng said.

"I really hope so," she replied, shutting off the machine as the doors closed behind Vasilyev. "Did you hear about the Boeing that went down?"

"Tragic, yes. They're still saying mechanical failure. Mikhail says his sister's boy is in the Russian Pacific Fleet, but he probably won't be part of the added search. I can't believe the Russians are sending the fleet out, in the middle of the Union Convention."

"Well, it's their fleet, it's not as though any of the other republics have ships in the Pacific Ocean they need to coordinate."

"Point taken. I must confess, you didn't strike me as the kind of person to follow that sort of political affairs business."

She titled her head. "My younger sister's a real news junkie."

"Of course."

Vasilyev came scrambling back, still wearing his protective suit, looking particularly excited. Matsumoto raised an eyebrow and was about to speak when he preempted her. "Yes, I went through the static bath again. That was the Locus-Solus—the Consortium approved our statement."

There was a moment of dead silence in the lab, ended by Zheng. "You're fooling me," he said slowly as Matsumoto shot up to her feet and hugged the older man before giving a loud hoot in triumph.

"We're approved! We've been approved!" she screamed excitedly before turning back to Vasilyev. "How many do they want?"

"One completed prototype, with the option for a second model following trial."

"High-end package?"

"The highest. We'll need to pull out all the stops on the prototype bioroid, their words."

"I can't believe it!" she shouted in Zheng's face. He didn't respond, still stunned into silence. " _I. CAN'T. BELIEVE. IT!_ "

"Well, let go of poor Zheng, he looks like he's seen a ghost," Vasilyev said grinning before grabbing the other doctor and shaking him by the shoulders.

"All right, all right, let go of me!"

"When do we start?" Matsumoto asked, her eyes still wide with excitement.

"Immediately, the funding's already gone through. Hell, we can replace the film layer! I mean, if have to," he quickly added, his hands raised in the air.

"We can start working on 'Uni' tomorrow," she whispered.

"Yes, but we're really going to need to do something about that name," Vasilyev interjected. "It's quite awful, Yoko," he said between laughs as Matsumoto pushed her palm into his face in response.

'Uni' was the name that Matsumoto Yoko insisted giving to Lab Three's first synthetic being, arrived at the same day Lab 3 decided that their first synthetic would be a modeled after a human female rather than male. Neither Zheng or Vasilyev were fond of the name, but conceded that it was better than the default option, Prototype Bio-Gynoid No. 1. Accordingly, the day after the call from Locus-Solus, she took a thick black marker and on the far wall of the laboratory, wrote two large letters in Japanese _hiragana_.

**ユニ**

"It was your dog, no? In grade school?" Vasilyev asked her.

"My cat," she corrected him. "A big, female tabby cat."

"I'm starting to see Misha's point," Zheng offered. Matsumoto ignored both of them. "I can see the headlines now: world's most advanced android model named after creator's cat."

There was no deterring her. On the other hand, the physical creation of Uni was a much more democratic process: after the Consortium promised to supply the processor 'brain', the three contributed individual components throughout the design reflecting their specialties: Zheng devised the respiratory system and most of the other internal organs, Vasilyev the skeleton and locomotive systems, and Matsumoto the optical and other sensory systems. The three of them had already agreed upon a component list weeks ago, and the Consortium's promise of near-unlimited funding led all three to go to the top choices from around the world.

What they had not decided upon, however, was its—or her—physical appearance. Uni had to be abnormally tall compared to an actual adult female, almost two meters tall, for reasons related to performance and internal layout. A pre-adult, even adolescent body was not technologically viable. Her internal balancing gyroscopes were intended to function for an automaton twice her size and substantially more massive. But after that, it was up to Lab 3's discretion: Locus-Solus expected a synthetic woman, and that was it. Aspects of its appearance—modeled ethnicity, facial structure, specific age—were left up to the creators.

"Very well then, so we just play God, yes?" Zheng posed on the first day.

While they waited for the components they ordered to be shipped express to their lab, the three put their minds together. There was surprisingly little disagreement.

On the matter of ethnicity and race, they decided on the deliberately uncommon: a combination of features that one would associate with a person of heterogeneous origins. Vasilyev, whose on background was Scandinavian and Slavic but whose wife was Indo-Vietnamese, was always intended to be the team's artistic modeler: Uni's complexion and certain facial features came from his eldest daughter, who was about the right age. Others came from younger, female members of both Zheng and Matsumoto's families. Vasilyev seamlessly combined them, and the resultant computer-generated facial model was both aesthetically pleasing and difficult to place, with a mixture of features from different nationalities. All three agreed this could be a benefit with the international consortium that was commissioning the project, and at least they didn't need to risk the possibility that the completed synthetic would resemble someone already alive.

Uni's body was quickly decided upon as well: Matsumoto had a stack of photo magazines of popular _gravure_ models sitting on her desk for this exact reason. As with her height, by necessity Uni would have a lean, fairly muscular build to hold the necessary muscles, tendons and ligaments in her form. All three had a similar vision of physical beauty though: they voted on a particular model from the magazines, an unusually tall, very well-endowed beauty with curvy hips and long legs, both aesthetically appealing and straightforward for them to engineer. Matsumoto was their specialist in this area, having made a hobby of 3D model building and painting since her undergraduate years.

Zheng finished the details, the sort of things that would turn make the synthetic Uni human, though not too human, at least on the surface. The overall facial model, in particular, was a challenge.

"It's the little things, little imperfections that you need," he explained, the way a painter hosting a television show might explain to his audience. "A very small imperfection in the nose or chin."

"I hope so. She's going to look like this for the rest of her life," Vasilyev noted. By then, they'd already taken to calling the bio-gynoid "her" in conversation.

Uni got a slightly upturned nose that gave her a cute, even precocious face on what was otherwise a grown woman. After they'd taken their hundreds of three-dimensional wireframe models and actually set about in the manufacturing process that would take thousands of separate components and gradually combine them.

The first phase was organ assembly. It took a few weeks before the bio-organs and skeleton, arranged on the assembly table, clearly resembled _homo sapiens sapiens—_ an anatomically modern human. "I knew this part would creep me out," Yoko announced, staring at the female skeleton reflected on the polished chrome surface, synthetic organs neatly packed into and around the skeletal frame. They hadn't been colored red yet, but stood out clearly from the sleeker, purely cybernetic components wrapped around the spinal column and skeleton.

"Me too," Zheng muttered uncomfortably.

"Well, you can't rush it," Vasilyev told them, circling the table with a number of different instruments, including a micrometer caliper. Every so often, using tweezers, he'd painstaking remove a tiny tubule between two organs, inspect them under a mobile microscope affixed to the ceiling, and reinsert them. The tiniest tubules were manipulated by Yoko, under Vasilyev's direction.

"If something goes wrong, it's not as though you couldn't fix it. That's what surgeons are for."

"True, but Locus-Solus is paying a _lot_ for Uni here," he declared. "It's not enough for her to be functionally immortal, I want a bio-gynoid as tough as a military-grade model if I can help it."

"Can we hurry up with this? As strange as it sounds, I'd much rather stare at a skinless woman than a woman-shaped skeleton with organ sacs sitting in it," Zheng confessed.

With everything firmly held in place, and the synthetic skeleton almost completely complete on its own, Uni was deemed "structurally sound" and suspended vertically the same way the latest full-body cyborgs were during construction. From there the next phase began—all three used tools to unravel several spools of synthetic muscular fiber, imitating the pattern of the over 630 skeletal muscles in a human body. As the muscle fibers were fairly uniform and practically placed, that was a short procedure completed in little more than an afternoon, after which she had an undeniably human female shape. To complete the phase, over the next few days the three systematically checked the appearance and function of the so-called "finishing organs"—synthetic eyes, the tongue, genitals and other organs that were all layered in special bio-organic sensory film and could only be installed at this time. Over a cup of expensive celebratory Darjeeling tea from northern India, they attached the large pair of implants that would serve as Uni's breasts, which necessitated being installed under her skin but over her synthetic pectorals. It was a humorous coincidence that the tea came in later than expected, leaving them only this task to toast it to.

"To our gorgeous synthetic _bijin_ ," Matsumoto said through her mask, holding the sealed container of tea. In full clean room garb, one could only drink it by attaching the bottle to one's breathing system and sucking it through a line. "May these gelatin polymer implants spare you from all the inconveniences that come with an actual large bosom, or so I've been told."

"Hear, hear," they muffled in reply, and stuck their team bottles to frames of their suits.

The celebratory toast marked the beginning of the third and final phase. Painstakingly, rectangular sheets of synthetic hypodermis, the "inner skin" that also functioned as cartilage that would automatically bind to the synthetic musculature, were saturated in a viscous micromachine solution and laid out, one-by-one, onto the body frame like a _papier-mâché_ art project. At the same time, the synthetic 'blood' that also flowed through full-body cyborgs was sent coursing through her veins, gradually turning her grey-white body into a very distinctive mixture of red and pink.

"I wonder how many people realize building a gynoid is like building a house," Matsumoto said, unconsciously wiping her brow.

"Fortune favors us: no leaks," Vasilyev pointed out, half-jokingly, as they laid the hypodermis sheets out, cutting off the excess, turning Uni back into a patchwork of grey-and-white once more. Unsurprisingly, installing the innermost layer of synthetic skin was a slow, painstaking process, cutting off the excess neatly and ensuring it had taken on some flexible hardness after binding to the skin. Nor were they finished: the entire body frame had to be soaked in sensory element-forming solution for several minutes, painstakingly dried and cleaned, and then soaked into another micromachine solution.

"Watch for any unevenness. You know Locus-Solus is going to go over every square centimeter of her with a microscope," Zheng instructed.

"I always hate this part of the job," Matsumoto mumbled, holding a portable air drier with a large filter attached to it over Uni's developing face.

The process, still uncommon at the time, matched the high-end procedures that full-body cyborgs would use in the coming decades: with the application of a small electrical charge, micromachines would bore small passages for optical fiber, the groundwork for a synthetic neural network. This was Matsumoto's specialty as well, as Vasilyev and Zheng got to sit it out.

"You know the next person who calls me a pervert, I'm going to hit," he told Vasilyev, as the two sat against the wall while Uni cooked in a chemical reactor. "I mean it this time."

Vasilyev nodded. In the weeks since they'd begun their project, they'd seen less and less of their cohorts in the other labs. Nonetheless, Zheng was cynical.

"See you boys in thirty-two hours," an exhausted Yoko said, dragging herself and her belongings towards the airlock door.

In that 32 hours, Uni received her synthetic epidermis and her body was completely "cooked", leaving Zheng to finish the facial details—hair implants, the self-repairing filaments for her eyebrows and eyelashes, lips, nose, teeth, etc. Yoko got to sit back with Vasilyev and watch.

"I'm telling you, in a few years, all the finishing touches will be done automatically, and we won't even need craftsmen anymore."

"You sound like you're looking forward to it," Matsumoto observed.

"It can't come soon enough for me."

"I don't know, Zheng. There's something to be said about a skilled craftsman plying his trade," Vasilyev offered, looking at the work. For the first time, Uni's actual face was visible—her slightly turned-up nose, her weakly-shut eyes, her full lips.

"Leave it to a dialectical materialist to say that," Zheng countered, which got a laugh from Vasilyev.

As in android manufacturing, the scalp hair came last, where it took the place of a wig. Yoko, with her characteristic forthrightness and medical bluntness, called a rep from Locus-Solus about the possibility of replicating human hair growth, and the costs that would be involved. The current androids and gynoids on the market were essentially hairless and wore wigs, with the exception of the highest-end models which benefitted from hair implantation technology.

"I'm sure you know better than us how expensive hair implantation is, so even the best androids only have it on their scalps," she explained on phone. "For bio-androids, this gets a little complicated, so I'll try and put it in laymen's terms. None of the internal bio-organs function using hair or cilia, not the lungs, not in the nasal passages, and so forth—that would be extremely costly and inefficient. Filaments are already used for things like eyebrows and eyelashes anyway. So the purpose of hair is purely cosmetic for a bio-android. Obviously, a completely hairless adult human _male_ would be considered somewhat unusual, which was a major advantage for both gynoids and bio-gynoids. And obviously, we won't just be giving her a wig."

Vasilyev and Zheng sat in their anti-static suits, watching Yoko continue to elaborate, in great depth, about the advantages and disadvantages of hair on a synthetic body before finishing twenty minutes later.

"And?"

"Only on her head," she concluded. "They did approve the 'hair budget' though, so we're over that."

Vasilyev held out a pen. "Correct me I'm wrong, but don't many women go to fairly extensive lengths to keep hair _only_ on their heads?"

"So the case could be made we're doing her a favor," Zheng added.

"And you're married?" Yoko asked him directly.

The next day they found Uni hanging suspended from the ceiling, nude, with her head stuck in an airtight apparatus. With a loud, wet _squick_ it popped off, revealing her completed scalp: a long, unkempt main of strawberry blonde hair that reached down past her waist with bangs that framed her face on either side. Yoko ran a comb through the hair to straighten it out slightly while Vasilyev pulled up her lips and gave her gums a cursory glance.

"She looks good."

"For what we spent on her, she better," Yoko replied as Zheng stood up and adjusted his glasses over his breather mask.

"We'll run a full examination with the CAT scanner later, but we won't actually know for certain until she's engaged."

"And only Locus-Solus can do that," Vasilyev mumbled. Zheng patted him on the shoulder supportively as he peered into Uni's left ear, otherwise hidden under her mop of hair.

"As the oldest member of Lab Three, I can say with some confidence that she'll operate perfectly once engaged. We've done an excellent job," Zheng announced.

Matsumoto turned to him after shaking her head. "So we really don't know until they decide to turn her on."

"We never can." Vasilyev cleared his throat, then spoke on a loftier tone. "As the only person here with any children, I do think it's a lot like having a daughter: you really don't know what kind of person she's going to be until she starts walking and talking.

There was a pause, before both Zheng and Matsumoto burst out laughing hysterically at his comment. Vasilyev looked at the two of them through his goggles before giving an indignant shake of his own head.

"Oh, to hell with you people."


	2. Chapter 2

For covering the costs of all labor, materials, and software licenses—which totaled close to the procurement cost for a new all-weather military attack helicopter—Locus-Solus had complete ownership of Uni, the synthetic life form, and all design data and results of research. The very new and relatively small Franco-Belgian company acted as the authorizing agent of the international consortium of interested conglomerates, who actually wrote the cheques.

After a four-month crash course of development, Uni was activated and ready for a corporate presentation. The tall synthetic—she stood a comfortable 183.5 centimeters barefoot—was put in what Matsumoto Yoko dubbed "an Alice dress" from its cutesy, anachronistic resemblance to the outfit worn in various film adaptations of the novel _Through the Looking Glass_ , and took up an executive class seat in the same row as the members of Lab Three on their European flight.

Uni, who had spent just over a week "awake" after being activated by a Locus-Solus company rep, sat in her frilly, high-collared blue-and-white dress with a smile permanently affixed to her pretty face, her mismatched eyes twinkling in the cabin lights.

Mikhail Vasilyev, who had the window seat next to Uni, noticed this and produced a small penlight, stood up in his seat, and with an order of "Hold still, dear," began flashing it directly into Uni's left, then right, eye.

"The colors have settled. The pigment is definitely more visible in the right eye than the left."

"So what does that mean?" Dr. Zheng asked from across the aisle. "Heterochromia?"

"Does it really matter?" Matsumoto asked sharply from her eat next to Zheng, looking up briefly from her old-fashion newspaper.

"Well, she's a woman, not a Siberian Husky, so I think it matters a little."

"Pride of creatorship. Let him have it," Zheng suggested to Matsumoto, who scoffed before looking back at her newspaper.

"We're days from another world war and you care about some pigment molecules not settling properly. God, have you read the papers?" she mumbled angrily. "All those maniacs sitting in Geneva seem perfectly content keep rattling their sabers."

"Except these sabers are nuclear missiles," Vasilyev muttered as he released Uni's face. The young woman blinked several times but said nothing, still smiling. "I'd feel better if China and the Americans could see eye-to-eye on something, but if they could, this would have been resolved a year ago."

"How's your nephew? The one in the navy?"

"Worried. Since the New Union Treaty, the whole of Eurasia is actually much more politically stable and strategically secure, but that's not going to _stop_ a war from happening." He sat back down in his seat. "I think he's on one of those ballistic missile submarines, a _Delfin-_ class I think. I bet the poor lad has nightmares that he's going to have to push a switch to send a nuclear missile to New York or Sacramento or somewhere," he explained somberly.

"The age we live in," Matsumoto said with disgust. "Uni's the lucky one—she'll never know just how f-ed up this world we live in is."

"Don't be so sure. She's smarter than she looks," Zheng countered.

Through all of this, Uni remained silent, but followed the conversation closely with short, sporadic movements of her eyes. The aircraft landed on the tarmac at Brussels Airport and all four quickly found a black limousine waiting for them outside the terminal. It promptly took them to Locus-Solus' storehouse north of Antwerp's docklands, adjacent to a large wind farm. A delegation of executives, including one with _Locus-Solus_ stitched onto the breast pocket of his blazer, were waiting for them. Between them, they represented American, German, Japanese and Chinese cybernetics and robotics firms. The Locus-Solus representative quickly introduced all three by name.

Matsumoto, Zheng and Vasilyev bowed, as did Uni who followed behind them. After looking up to see the executives return their bows, Zheng glanced at his colleagues then back at the executives. "So I will begin: let me introduce you to the fruit of your investment, sirs. We call this young lady 'Uni'," he explained, gesturing at her.

Uni stood very still, a pleasant but still neutral expression on her face, as the body of executives stared at her curiously.

"Uni is a completely synthetic organism, one of the first of her kind. Bio-organic gynoid combining the highest advances in medicine, biochemistry, cloning and cybernetics—the dominant fields of your corporations, I think."

A rather elderly man with a cane approached the much-taller Uni before reaching out and taking her hand, which he squeezed. "She feels very lifelike."

Matsumoto cleared her throat. "Well sir, she is alive, in a manner of speaking. Uni's biological processes have more in common with full-body cyborgs than other gynoids. She respires, she can eat food and break it down for its nutritional value, and she can even repair her own body. Of course, Uni's much tougher than any normal human."

"How tough?"

The three of them turned to see a stout woman with thick glasses looking at them. Uni didn't, her hand still clenched by the old man leaning on a cane.

"How tough is she?" the executive repeated.

Vasilyev spoke up. "Uni could, without a doubt, survive trauma that would kill a human being, and the cybernetic redundancy of her synthetic body means, short of destroying her completely, one really couldn't do anything that would incapacitate her in a manner that couldn't ultimately be repaired…using the design data that we've supplied to Locus-Solus along with her."

"Could you be more specific, Doctor?" she insisted. Behind the body of executives, a Locus-Solus employee was pushing up a cart carrying a number of different-sized black boxes, followed by another one pushing a larger cart filled with neatly packed athletic equipment.

"I…don't completely understand."

She sighed. "Could you shoot her in the head with a small-caliber firearm and would she survive?" she spelled out sharply.

Vasilyev visibly jumped in his shoes while Matsumoto shook her head discreetly behind him. "Yes…yes! She's immune to limited exposure to pistol-caliber fire, the kind that would kill a person. Though the coming generation of full-body military cyborgs will probably match her durability."

"You say 'her'," another executive said, standing near the cart. "Rather than 'it'."

Vasilyev looked a little confused and offended, so Zheng answered for him. "Actually, by the relevant laws of the European Union, she arguably _is_ a woman, though a synthetic one. You're welcome to look more closely at her if you'd care to," he said, glancing at Uni. The old executive had strolled off, leaving Uni to calmly smooth the creases of her bright-looking dress.

"I don't think that'll be necessary."

"And, of course, Locus-Solus holds all rights and patents associated with her, including manufacturing rights for any future models. Though that might be a little premature: let's see what she can do first."

Uni took off her shoes and stripped down to the athletic shorts and bra she wore underneath her dress and, over the next hour after Locus-Solus hastily set up the needed equipment, performed a number of athletic feats for the delegation: a 300-meter sprint, completed in just under 32 seconds, an Olympic-competitive time; a long jump, reaching 8.2 meters on her first attempt; some basic gymnastics to demonstrate her agility and grace. The executives followed her closely, using the radar guns and other instruments distributed by Locus-Solus, while the members of Lab Three studied her performance with their own eyes.

"As you can see, a synthetic like her can complete acts of athleticism, with no real training, an obtain results comparable to skilled Olympians," the Locus-Solus rep explained, dutifully checking the stopwatch he held in his hands. "Equally as impressive, she can repeat these feats over and over, with excellent consistency and without tiring quickly."

Uni sprinted around the small 300-meter track set up by a number of small flags set along the warehouse walls, as the rep timed her. "Again, not even thirty-two seconds."

The corporate executives clapped politely at the results. One stepped forward, in a dull-grey suit with a patterned tie. "Excuse me, but may we speak to her?"

The Locus-Solus rep looked surprised himself this time.

"She can talk, right?"

"Of course she can talk," the rep replied incredulously, stealing a glance at Lab Three, who didn't respond. "But from what I understand, her level of intelligence won't be much more impressive than that of a high-end commercial android. She's only a week old, after all," he said, forcing a laugh.

He looked at them directly. "Could you bring her over here?"

"There's no real trick it," Matsumoto interrupted, before cupping her mouth. "Uni! _Kochi kochi!_ " she shouted, much the way someone would speak to a cat. Unlike a cat, Uni obediently turned off the track and jogged right up to her before stopping, arms flat against her sides.

"Does she only speak Japanese?" someone asked the Locus-Solus rep, who shook his head.

"No, no…on the contrary, she's mastered multiple languages," he explained. "Madame, could you...switch her to French?"

"If you speak to her in French, she'll answer in it," Matsumoto replied indignantly. "Same for any language she knows, it's in her most basic programming."

The rep coughed in his hand. "Of course. _Mademoiselle_ ," he said, addressing Uni now. " _Venez ici s'il vous plait!_ " he said, very deliberately. More eye-rolling from Matsumoto as Uni politely walked up and attempted to curtsy, only to realize she was missing her earlier dress: a particularly lifelike, human mistake.

" _Comment vous appelez-vous?_ " the rep asked. The lab members could hear someone in the back of the crowd translating his question into English.

" _Je m'appelle Uni, monsieur_ ," Uni replied, practically purring the response but remaining polite. Vasilyev held back a snort.

The Locus-Solus continued with his line of questions in French, steadily rising in difficulty, though remaining in general topics—the time of day, advanced arithmetic, minute visual details about the consortium representatives behind him. Uni could accurately guess their ages to within a two-year period, with no prior knowledge, using her synthetic eyes and internalized medical database, and was frequently much closer. A representative took a baseball from the cart and tossed it at Uni when he thought she wasn't looking, only to have her catch it behind her head and hold it politely, to some mumbles of approval from her audience.

"Really, we should shoot it in the head and see how well it functions," the earlier executive offered, crossing her arms.

This time Zheng objected. "Excuse me! I don't want to be rude, ma'am, but I would repeat this is a highly advanced bio-cybernetic product! Do you test all your proof-of-concept prototypes by shooting them in the head?"

"Now, now," the Locus-Solus rep interrupted. "I'm sure that won't be necessary. In fact, this presentation has been _very_ informative I think, and I think the good members of Lab Three are entitled to a round of applause."

By the time the three of them arrived at their hotel room in Antwerp, some of the uncomfortable tension had passed. Vasilyev was immediately planted to the television, anxiously watching the unfolding political crisis in Geneva.

"I bet you thought it was going to be the South China Sea that kicked off this crisis, didn't you?" Matsumoto asked the back of his head.

"Leave him alone, he's got family in the military, unlike you or I," Zheng chided her, while Vasilyev just waved a hand in dismissal. "I'm sure it'll be fine, Misha. How many staring contests like this have we seen in our time?"

Zheng turned away. "Right now, I'm a bit worried about leaving Uni with that Locus-Solus rep."

"Well, it's their product, they paid for her," Matsumoto pointed out cynically. "The least they can do is take her for a 'test ride' for a day."

Zheng's shoulders twitched abruptly. "Thank you for reminding me."

"I'm sure they're all very professional," Vasilyev told him quietly, not turning from the news coverage.

"In my experience, the rich have very strange perversions compared to the rest of us," he despaired before plopping down in his chair.

It was late that evening, after all three had returned from dining out that the call came in.

" _Am I on speaker phone?_ " the Locus-Solus rep asked as the three gathered around their small end table in their shared suite.

"You are, go ahead," Vasilyev assured him.

" _Right. First, I just wanted you three to know that I think you really wowed the consortium representatives this morning. I know you brilliant science types aren't exactly at your forte when it comes to business presentations, but you did very well! We all knew a state-of-the-art bio-gynoid was going to be a hard sell, but someone had to come first, and it was going to be Locus-Solus!_ "

"Wowed?" Zheng asked Vasilyev, who just shrugged.

"So what's the bad news?" Matsumoto asked.

" _It's not really bad news!_ " he insisted. " _In fact, we're…we're going to go ahead and order a second unit, an exact duplicate. Produced as-soon-as-possible!_ "

Vasilyev looked at his companions, giving a hopeful shrug. "An exact duplicate? You know, it won't be much cheaper, only minus the cost of the manufacturing equipment…"

" _No, we know, and we're confident it's well worth it! Obviously, a piece of hardware like Uni isn't an easily-marketable commercial product when she costs as much as a Swiss chateau, but…well, you saw her on the track, she's a perfect technology demonstrator and marketing unit!_ "

"He's right," Zheng noted.

" _So, we think we'd like to take two of them 'on the road', so to speak—trade shows, conventions, and so forth._ "

"So basically they'd just be racing queens without the car," Matsumoto pointed out stiffly. Zheng and Vasilyev both gave a slightly confused look. "Not that there's anything wrong with that!" she quickly added.

" _Here's the real point: can you do it? Give Uni a twin in the next month?_ "

Vasilyev preemptively pressed the hold button on the telephone set before turning to his colleagues. "Fine, I'll say it: we all know the answer to this question." He looked both of them in the eyes. "Don't we?"

Matsumoto gave an exasperated sigh while Zheng touched the button again and cleared his throat.

"Yes, I'm sure we can."


	3. Chapter 3

It took Lab Three just under five weeks to complete Uni's clone, almost a fourth the time the original. Much of the time saved came from not needing to place orders and wait for new manufacturing equipment to be delivered to their lab in Okayama. Familiarity with the process and building on experience accounted for the rest.

The second synthetic was named Anna, after Vasilyev's eldest daughter. He had objected at first, favoring a name voted on democratically, but Matsumoto insisted she'd already had her strike with Uni, and Zheng thought it a lovely follow-up. "Anna and Uni," the two repeated, as though the words tasted good to them. Vasilyev soon relented.

As requested, Anna was an exact duplicate of Uni. She stood 1835 millimeters tall barefoot, with an identical face and body. Her hair even took on the unkempt, even wild quality of Uni's long strawberry blond mop. Without the use of high-end instruments, a single feature distinguished the two units physically.

"I told you the molecules were up to no good," Vasilyev told them on an early inspection of Anna's eyes. The pigment in her irises, originally uniform, had settle a week later, resulting in the same heterochromia that Uni possessed, with one blue and one green eye.

Zheng took a close look. "…it's reversed, isn't it? From Uni?"

Vasilyev gave a defeatist sigh and Zheng took the penlight from him. "You really need to be less of a perfectionist, my friend."

Mismatched heterochromia was the lone physical distinction between the two, and that was difficult to ascertain even for their creators. The next step was to make them behaviorally identical. With the help of a one of Zheng's programming colleagues, the members of Lab Three carefully duplicated Uni's AI routines and subroutines into Anna's brain. "Dubbing", and the process was called, not only saved them time and money, it further linked the two into an inseparable duo, acting as though they each possessed a hemisphere of the same brain—at least, in Zheng's opinion. From Anna's "birth" onwards, the two would have necessarily divergent experiences, but an inerasable commonality made up the foundation of both their personalities and their entire perception of the universe.

"Does that answer the question?" Yoko asked Zheng.

"Which question is that?"

"Do either of them have 'ghosts'?"

"No, I guess it doesn't. If one does, so must the other, but I'm not sure they do. Not yet. Technology says they shouldn't, but technology changes."

"But right now?"

"No, not right now." He paused before adding, "I think."

Anna awoke six weeks to the day after her elder sister, as Vasilyev had taken to calling Uni. Matsumoto pointed out that it was just as accurate to call her Uni's daughter as well as twin, but quickly found herself using the same terms, almost unconsciously. Aside from their shared appearance, something about how the two carried on closely intimated siblinghood over anything else, though no such notion had been added to their programming. Upon their first meeting, the two spent an hour moving in perfect mirrored symmetry before abruptly stopping and engaging one another in a familial, even intimate manner in unspoken body language.

"It's possible they'll be closer than any human pair could be—they shared the same mind, after all," Vasilyev disclosed after the first few days of observation.

"Let's hope that's Locus-Solus wants."

He shook his head at Yoko. "No. I say let's hope that's what _they_ want."

A thrilled Locus-Solus took delivery of them, before immediately handing them over to Hanka Precision Instruments, who eagerly sought to use them on the convention circuit. More than Locus-Solus, Hanka knew exactly what they wanted from the pair: they put Anna and Uni in brightly colored, logo-emblazoned one-piece swimsuits with frilly trim that rose high on their tall hips, and had them sit seductively on new hardware at their corporate booths on the North American convention circuit—just as Lab Three expected them to. Vasilyev had gone as far as to warn Locus-Solus that neither Uni nor Anna could be easily programmed like the lifelike androids and gynoids Hanka Precision were promising down the road, but was assured that this wasn't an issue. Locus-Solus appeared to be right: when Lab Three attended the world-renown BI*Con in San Francisco later that year, they found their presence largely unnecessary, as both synthetics flawlessly performed their duties as tantalizing décor/technology demonstrators. On a typical day, Uni would lie on her stomach looking up, showing off her lean, muscular back and posterior in her rather skimpy one-piece, while Anna sat nearby, one leg propped up, sticking her large chest out and arching her shoulders. Unlike human models, the two only moved when they needed to—they might remain in a given pose for an hour or more on the showroom floor, almost entirely motionless. More surprising than their obviously-learned behavior, though, was how the two had mastered emotional displays.

"Look at that smile," Yoko said from behind the crowd. "I'm being serious, look at their smiles." Uni, and by extension Anna, had only been programmed with a much more sexually-neutral, friendly smile. Since then, they mastered a whole arsenal of different smiles for the audience.

"You think it's learned?"' Zheng asked.

"It has to be, Hanka Precision doesn't have access to the programming routines, and Locus-Solus doesn't know how to use them."

"You're right."

The pair _did_ do more than serve as living eye-candy—in front of larger crowds, Hanka put them through some basic demos of strength, having Anna smash a cement block to fragments with her bare fist and Uni easily lift a 1400cc sport bike onto her shoulders like it was a barbell. Those were enormous crowd-pleasers—less impressive were their rather simplistic social skills. When interaction went beyond seductive eyelash-batting or pushing their cleavage into view, the two maintained very basic social skills, and few industry experts were impressed by walking calculators and encyclopedias that each cost as much as much as a business jet each, though there were exceptions.

The children and grandchildren of executives at Hanka Precision Instruments, as well as Holland-based Serano Genomics and Tokura Electronics, came on the last day of the convention. Vasilyev, still on his post in the unlikely event of some sort of technical malfunction, watched as a pair of very small but well-dressed children, having escaped the attention of their guardian, spotted the two bio-gynoids taking a moment to adjust their skimpy advertising attire from riding up on them. Momentarily worried, he called his partners to come to the booth; when they arrived, they found him grinning from ear-to-ear.

"Look at that!"

Anna, her voice imitating the saccharine tone of a television series nanny, had leaned down, hands on her knees, to cheerfully chat with a six-year-old boy clutching a plush panda bear. Next to her, Uni sat on the floor, legs crossed, while his eight-year-old sister began braiding a length of hair as long as she was tall. Most surprising of all, the two were sporting remarkably humanlike expressions of friendliness and openness, in place of their static "come hither" looks.

"They have a way with children, don't they?" Vasilyev marveled as an arriving Matsumoto took out her camera.

"Well, they can never have their own, can they?" Zheng pointed out.

Vasilyev stared at him momentarily as his eyes filled with realization before he shrank a little. "Oh my. I'm sorry, old chap. I didn't…"

Zheng laughed instead, shaking his head. "What are you sorry for?" he assuaged him, giving him a friendly jab of the elbow.

Gradually more executive children flocked to the giant talking, breathing toy dolls, while Anna let them climb up onto her shoulders and Uni continued to be braided. Their musculature had changed subtly too—the firm, lean frames they'd been "born" with had grown a little softer, a little more curvaceous, the consequence of a low level of physical activity, another humanlike quality they possessed.

BI*Con was the last convention Lab Three attended in support of the two—after that, what technical expertise they offered was done through reports and emails. The pair went on to function nominally in their advertising role. Matsumoto was mildly disappointed: she'd genuinely hoped for more erratic, unpredictable behavior from the two over time, none having manifested yet. The companies that had footed the bill had no such interest; they were more interested in the possibility of aftermarket mod packages in the future. Vasilyev couldn't understand why when either sister cost as much as an attack helicopter.

"You might as well add underbody lights to a Ferrari!" he grumbled. "Or more accurately, a Bombardier Learjet!"

A few weeks short of a year after Anna's activation, Locus-Solus approached Lab Three about the possibility of a derivative design—mechanically similar but simplified, and with less advanced cognitive and neurological functions. The members, particularly Zheng, were unenthused with the request but agreed to consider the new project. A new design statement would be sent to them within the next few days. It did not come.

Half a world away in Amsterdam, wearing logo-emblazoned bikinis and ball caps, Uni and Anna were advertising a pair of phenomenally expensive motorcycles the otherwise-unremarkable summer day the Third World War broke out. It was the last anyone in Lab Three heard of their original creations.

It was the international spats of the year before that abruptly resurfaced following a naval skirmish in the problematic South China Sea between the United States and People's Liberation Army navies. There was little warning of such a showdown, aside the abrupt collapse of the U.S.-led collective defense pact between itself, South Korea, and Japan in the preceding months. The three-state triangle, a product of the aftermath of the Second World War, was intended to form an East Asian equivalent to NATO—it instead folded abruptly and catastrophically in the face of reconciliation between Beijing and Seoul, inflammatory rhetoric between Seoul and Tokyo, and an absence of activity from the youngest regional power, the Union of Eurasian Republics.

The United States had counted on the Union State, in the style of the Soviet Union, to take a strong, antagonistic stance on Pacific politics. Whether out of fear or just apathy, it had failed to do so. Simultaneously, the People's Republic of China had economically courted South Korea to great effect, benefiting from political hostility with Japan over disputed island territories and controversial historical revisionism. North Korea exploded its first nuclear device, upsetting the situation further. A politically-weakened Japan desperately sat out, and managed to do so, reneging on its past promises to the United States—something hawkish leaders in Washington would remember. The tiny Republic of China, dwarfed by its neighbors on all sides, staunchly announced its noninvolvement, another thorn to the United States: it had counted on Taipei to seize the initiative against the ruling Communist Party in Beijing, but had failed to appreciate that Taiwan's own South China Sea claims meshed with China's, reunification or not.

China and America found themselves facing-off, alone. Unlike Asia, NATO moved to honor its treaty obligations, a fatal move for precariously-poised alliance, and the Union State publicly condemned what it termed "American aggression" against its regional sometimes-partner, sometimes-rival China. For some time, it seemed the whole affair might ultimately by a more-tense repeat of the political posturing that had become a familiar fact of life a decade after the end of the Cold War.

The limited nuclear exchange that followed, consuming millions of lives in a matter of days, dismissed that.

Lab Three, and practically all the technology programs at Okayama University, were hurriedly evacuated in the days after it became apparent that what had begun with Chinese submarines and American carriers going from standby to full war operations was only going to escalate. Zheng, Vasilyev and Matsumoto remained together briefly in Nagoya before Zheng and Vasilyev received permission to return to their respective homelands and their families. They parted with Matsumoto, leaving fond memories and promises to stay in touch, promises they couldn't keep. The ceasefire came in a matter of weeks, after a world, apparently shocked back to its senses by thermonuclear explosions, clamored for peace. Through a fellow student in her PhD program, Matsumoto Yoko became one of the first people to witnessed what the world media latter dubbed the "Japanese miracle" in action, a revolutionary new technology that effectively counteracted the harmful radioactive fallout left by even the high-efficiency thermonuclear weapons used in combat. The tiny micromachines almost single-handedly secured Japan's position of influence in the postwar world, from their first successful use cleaning the aftermath left from American hydrogen bombs exploded in northeast China.

If Japan had just barely managed to be a winner of the Third World War, it was the United States who seemed its primary loser. Even the Chinese leaders who had ordered their nuclear response to their enemy had not predicted the sudden fracturing of the dominant superpower. The United States of America had entered the war in an unparalleled level of political division—many had privately hoped the war would rally the people behind a common banner, against a common enemy. The costly and politically-devastating truce, with neither side particularly advantageous over the other, had the opposite effect. The conservative political establishment, and the majority of the American defense industry that it closely controlled, exerted complete political will over the majority of southern states, from New Mexico to Virginia—territory it had _de facto_ political control over for decades in the fractured legislature. In response, the left-leaning rival party, itself well-established in the American northeast and west coast, formed a competing establishment in California and the surrounding states, as well as from Illinois to New England. Infighting only started after Chinese thermonuclear weapons cratered strategic military centers between the two, as both sides charged the other with collusion. It only took a few covert military campaigns, the so-called "Fake Wars" to split a 200-year-old nation apart at the seams. The United States, and its indisputable suzerainty over the western hemisphere, stopped being.

When the fighting ended, a relatively low number of casualties had cemented the reality: there now existed two functioning nations, with completely independent military and economic establishments, both claiming the title of United States of America. With the formalizing of a ceasefire, they were joined by a third that included the largely-abandoned areas of Arizona, Utah, and running from Washington to Wisconsin, a national reminder of the inability to reconcile. For a few months, they sat as if in purgatory, before the rightist state, the strongest militarily, moved to secure its porous border with economically-collapsed Mexico.

It was Eurasian politicians from the Union who devised the two names that the whole world would eventually adopt, starting with the words uttered offhandedly by the Russian-speaking Eurasian Chairman of Ministers: Американская империя, _Amerikanskaya imperiya_ , a nod to both the Tsar's historical _Rossiyskaya imperiya_ and the western political cliché of the "Soviet Empire." To her surprise, the initial indignant response from the White House was replaced by a begrudging acknowledgement and then an enthusiastic embrace: by the time her successor took the office, he would find himself in delicate negotiations with a rising world power self-identified as Imperial Americana and the heir of the pre-war Pax Americana. At the same time, his tired predecessor spoke of a left-leaning "American Alliance," in whom Moscow had found an amiable partner, alongside a militarized, resource-rich Canada. Sandwiched between them, the supposedly-centrist sick man of North America, still called the United States, eked out a living, playing the two rivals off one another and acting as a needed buffer.

In the outright chaos after the thermonuclear bombs fell, a billion people alone were displaced in the first year. The two synthetic sisters were among them, either sold-off or traded between different high-tech firms, not all of which survived the war, before being stolen outright. Their value forgotten or inconsequential, they quietly fell into the crowd of stolen second-hand gynoids sold for any number of functions and trades, industrial, sexual, criminal and more. Though inseparable themselves, they passed briefly through Russian organized crime before being given to Texan cartels as payment for narcotics. From the cartels they were seized by Californian smugglers and put on black market for hard currency, just blocks from the San Francisco convention center they'd once appeared in. Purchased by the Yakuza, they were cargo along with a hundred other grey market androids delivered into Niihama on Osaka bay.

It was there the two did something they could have done at any point in the past year since the Third World War ended: they escaped.


	4. Epilogue

The early morning's choking smog over most of Niihama, from the ocean coast to the Inland Sea, demanded urban residents wear masks with commercial-grade air filters if they wanted to remain outdoors during conditions worse than the most polluted afternoons in pre-Third World War India or China.

Wearing one such mask, a PhD in bioengineering carefully exited his sedan, briefcase in tow, in front of third-story cybernetics lab he worked in, one a dozens of small clinics found throughout Niihama City. Struggling from the exertion, he took the outside stairs up two flights before pausing at the door to the clinic and mumbling, "When's that damn lift going to get fixed?"

In his exertion, he hadn't noticed the remarkably tall woman in an unzipped leather jacket, too-small PVC pants, leather motorcycle boots and a dull-colored scarf following quietly behind him. Only after he'd opened the door and she jammed her large fist forward, swinging it open completely, did he see finally her. Falling backwards into the clinic, he scrambled away as she barged in and closed the door behind her.

The tall woman undid her scarf and tossed off her leather jacket—under them she was wearing a black bustier multiple sizes too small for her, but no air mask. Her face had some features that seemed vaguely Slavic to him, like what he'd seen in films or magazines, but it wasn't possible to place if she was a foreigner or had an expatriate parent. He _could_ also see she was holding a submachine gun in her right hand, tapping the trigger guard anxiously. The PhD chose to remain very, very still, which he thought was his safest decision.

With her ridiculously long strawberry blonde hair and some bandages wrapped around her head, looked annoyed at him. She said something muffled-sounding—he couldn't hear well through his mask—before stomping over to him and yanking the mask off. He gave a yelp.

"Can you hear me now?" she growled angrily.

"Yes, yes, I can hear you! There's a little money in the safe in the back office, I'll open it! Just don't hurt me with _that_ thing!" he said, before pointing at the weapon.

She cocked her head and gave him a contemptuous look. "This is a Calridge S9, modified for automatic fire, and I'm not gonna' hurt you, as long as you do what we tell you to do." She had a definite accent, Kansai- _ben_ , which the doctor hadn't been expecting.

"We?"

The tall woman snapped her fingers and the door slammed open again and an identical woman—literally indistinguishable except for the slight difference of her attire, a low-cut, torn tank top that exposed her muscular stomach, leggings instead of pants, but the same scarf and leather jacket—entered, also holding an automatic weapon of the same make and with the same bandages around her head.

After depriving him of his keys, the twin thugs proceeded to make themselves comfortable, tossing their combat boots and their submachine guns aside while one lay across the waiting room couch. The PhD sat very still, not getting up off the floor.

Unsure what they were waiting for, he worked up the courage to speak. "Well, I…"

"You're Dr. Watanabe, right?"

He'd kept his hands raised the whole time. "Yes. Listen, I'm not sure what you want, but…"

"Good, so we'll tell you," the second one interrupted him. Her voice was slightly different in pitch, though she had the same unusually-strong Kansai accent that was less and less common in Niihama, but still more familiar then her appearance. Dr. Watanabe was becoming convinced they must have been highly-modified cyborgs when the tall woman confirmed it. "You're the bio-cyberization doc, right?"

"Yes, that's one of my fields."

The second woman pointed at her bandages—the same as her twin—around her head. A look of understanding appeared on his face. "Of course. You're cyberized, that makes perfect sense. I don't know why I didn't make the connection sooner."

"Do you usually talk to yourself like this?" the first woman asked.

"Only when I'm nervous," he assured them, taking his reading glasses out of his blazer pocket and putting them on before adopting a more scholarly tone. "So what can I do for you two ladies? Obviously, this facility isn't equipped to perform any major surgeries or enhancements…"

"Shut up," the second woman ordered, not taking her eyes from the wall covered with framed credentials and photographs.

"Or I can do that."

The first woman cocked her head at her twin, as though not entirely agreeing with her sentiment, then turned to him. "We just need a checkup, that's all," she told him before pointing at her temple again.

"Recent surgery?" he guessed.

She gave her twin a self-congratulatory nod, causing the other to, his surprise, stick her tongue out at her briefly.

"Well, you've come to the right person, though I wish you hadn't." Lowering both of his hands up slowly, he rose to his feet and gestured to the nearby desk—when both women ignored this, he crossed the room normally and reached into his desk. He didn't have a license to keep a firearm in his possession, and either they knew this or for whatever reason didn't care if he did.

"Oh, and before you try anything stupid, we already cut the silent alarm and CCTV," the second shouted at him from the couch, forcing Dr. Watanabe to give a deep, heaving sigh. He promptly returned with a printed sheet of paper tacked to a cheap clipboard with a pen hanging from an elastic cord.

"You're kiddin' me, right?" she asked.

"All my patients do it. You want me to treat you, you'll sign in," he explained stubbornly.

The tall woman appeared to contemplate responding negatively—perhaps with gunfire—but instead snatched the clipboard and scribbled something down before tossing it at her twin, who caught it in her free left hand without looking away from the small portion of the lobby wall covered in framed portraits and scribbled something else. Dr. Watanabe hurriedly took it back and tried as casually as he could to inspect it, though was caught unaware by just how neat their handwriting was in _katakana_.

**ユニ**

**アンナ**

"So, you're Uni- _san_ ," he said, pointing at the first of the two women. Feeling the groves machined metal of her firearm with her right hand's fingers, she nodded. "And that would make you Anna-san. And you're sisters."

They said nothing.

"Right?"

"Come on, _hakase_ , we don't got all day," Uni announced loudly before grabbing him by the shoulder and effortlessly pushing him in the direction of one of the examination rooms. Anna followed behind, resting the automatic on her shoulder like it was her purse or a bag of groceries.

"Oh, and just in case you get some _other_ stupid questions," Uni asked before winking mischievously at Anna, now standing behind the doctor. Anna winked back with the opposite eye and, as though it were nothing, quick-drew a Glock 18C, another automatic pistol, out from her leather jacket and fired a half-second long burst immediately past the doctor's face, so close that he could feel the heat of the muzzle flash against his cheek. Seven neat holes appeared in the wall opposite them. Dr. Watanabe fell backwards onto his back shrieking, while Anna gave a malevolent snicker and the pistol disappeared into the obscured area between her left breast and her underarm.

"Got it, hakase?" Uni asked, grinning and her eyes closed. When she opened them, she found he was still on the ground, holding his ears. "Hakase?"

Dr. Watanabe looked up at him. " _What?_ " he yelled, followed by " _I can't hear you!_ "

After waiting the ten minutes it took the doctor's hearing to return, he attended to his first patient, Anna, who took off her leather jacket before sitting on the examination table. An underarm holster was hanging loosely from her muscular left shoulder, the pistol's high-capacity magazine sticking out like the grip of a knife.

Repeatedly taking his fingers in and out of his ears, he walked up to the table and remained as composed as he could. Reaching into a nearby box of latex gloves, he loudly and deliberately pulled on a pair. "What seems to be the problem, aside from your sociopathic disposition towards violence and dangerous familiarity with guns?"

Anna smirked before pointing at the bandages wrapped hastily around the top third of her head, underneath her orange-blonde bangs.

"Head trauma?"

"Sort of."

He snorted with a little more confidence. "If you think you're going to surprise me, I hope you don't shoot people who disappoint you. I've performed cyberization surgeries on four continents and eleven time zones, ages ten to eighty-eight. You're not Tokura Eka. Whatever it is, I've seen it."

Raising an eyebrow, Anna's bare shoulders gave a muscular shrug and she began quickly undoing the bandages around her head, which Dr. Watanabe found were much longer and more elaborately wrapped over part of her long, chaotic-looking strawberry blonde hair than he'd expected, and he unconsciously braced himself for the sort of things he'd seen in his field: criminally sloppy surgeries, jury-rigged aftermarket parts, severe cranial trauma, and even large, gaping holes in people's skulls.

It was none of those things, and the doctor literally jumped back when he saw it.

"Are those _ears_?"

Rising out of her messy, matted blonde hair were two large, soft-looking tapered ears. He could see they the same flesh-color as the rest of her skin, hairless and symmetrical triangles. _Cat ears_ , he immediately thought. They seem to sit on the top of her skull, poking out from her hair towards the ceiling. Immediately, he looked downwards and pushed a long lock of hair out of the way on the left side of Anna's head. Where there would have normally been a human ear, approximately, there was nothing. Just a faint line that looked like a fading scar left by a very well-performed cosmetic surgery.

"Those…those are _your_ ears," he muttered, looking back at them. Nervously, he touched a pen from his pocket against the left ear, watching it twitch slightly, just like an animal's would.

"You have _cat ears_ , Anna- _kun_ ," he marveled.

"Yeah, hakase, we've been over this." Still nonchalant, Anna threw the surprisingly-clean length of gauze against the wall, letting it fall onto a closed medical waste bin.

"Does your sister know?" he asked after looking up, immediately realizing how stupid a question that was. "Wait, she has them too, doesn't she? Did one of you have to get new ears so the other one needed them as well?" he asked, his voice hushed. "So you'd still be identical!"

Anna's attractive face abruptly turned very cold and callous, indicating this was a poor line of questioning to pursue further, and he took a step back.

"Hey! I'm cool! I mean, I work in the industry! I'm not judging! I mean, god knows how your giant blond mother feels about her two daughters getting their _heads permanently remodeled_ , but hey, it's the times, right?" he insisted.

More eye-rolling from Anna. The doctor felt he was getting through to her with the same level of success as he did with his daughter about her smoking habit, her increased number of piercings and her punk band. Tapping a finger against his head, he reached out and snapped his fingers to the side of either ear, watching them twitch.

"Well, you seem to have no problems with your hearing, so I imagine they work?" he questioned.

"I know they work, hakase!"

"Then why did you bust into here?"

"You're the doc, you tell me!" she growled back, putting her hands on her hips. "You're a doctor, so doctor!" she shouted, using the word as a verb.

He sighed again. "Well, they don't look infected or anything, though really, that sort of thing is more common with interface ports," he said, circling around her and pushing her long hair out of the way. Staring at her muscular, mostly naked back, he found the standard six-part QRS cyberbrain interface ports on the back of her neck, just underneath her hairline. "Yours are fairly new by the looks of it. Did you and your sister get cyberized recently?"

Anna gave a very loud yawn. "Nah, we just upgraded to QRS."

 _Strange_. Ever since International Telecommunication and Cybercommuication Union (ITCU), a French-managed United Nations special agency, had settled upon the QRS as the international standard for cyberbrain interfaces, it'd quickly replaced the far slower USB, Thunderbolt, and Firewire interfaces inherited from personal computer manufacturing, and there'd been a rush cross Japan and elsewhere for people getting the relatively short out-patient surgery to get human, rather than PC, purposed input/output interfaces. In a few years, anyone who underwent cyberization surgery would get QRS ports installed by default, but in the meantime some people had older interfaces to upgrade from.

"Well, they did a very clean job of it. I don't even see any scarring," he told her.

"Great," she muttered back at him.

"You'll need to get them recalibrated regularly, of course. Are you getting any interference from the connections? A lot of QRS surgeries look perfect on the outside, but there's interference on the contacts…"

"Yeah, hakase, that's a _human_ problem," she said with another yawn.

He sighed and rolled his eyes. _Nothing like a patient who doesn't want to be treated._ "Well, fine then, send in your sister!"

"Hey _sis_ ," Anna shouted, an unmistakably sarcastic tone to her voice that briefly confused Dr. Watanabe. There was no response, but Anna didn't seem the least concerned. "Go get her, would you?" she asked, getting off the table and throwing her leather jacket over a shoulder.

Yanking off his latex gloves, he found the other giant staring at the wall in the lobby covered by framed photographs.

"Hey, hakase, who are these losers?" Uni asked, pointing at a particular portrait hanging on the wall. A number of scholarly-looking lab technicians stood in their white coats, in front of a building on the outskirts of a town.

"That's the lab team at Okayama, where I trained," he muttered hurriedly. "All the best cybernetic specialists were there before the war."

"No kidding?"

"No, I'm not kidding. Now come on, let's get this over with."

While he put on a fresh pair of gloves, Uni repeated her twin's behavior almost exactly, taking off her leather jacket with the same motions before sitting on the same spot on the examination table with the same casual disinterest.

"I saw the ears," he informed her.

"Did you now?" Uni asked with an obviously alluring and very mischievous smile that made him a little uncomfortable.

"I'm not going to ask _why_ you have cat ears," he told her, pulling off the last part of the bandages.

"Good."

"I _am_ going to assume it has something to do with some sort of _extreme cosplay fetish_ ," he told her frankly as he turned away to find an examination penlight on the counter. Uni gave an undignified pout at the back of his head before turned back and began looking directly into her ears.

"It was a good surgery I have to admit. I don't see puss or blood or even any wax." He looked her in the eye again. "Does your cerumen secrete into these?" He didn't have any other patients with cat ears to reference.

"You mean ear wax? My old ears didn't have them."

"I find that hard to believe," he muttered with a roll of his eyes before putting away the penlight. "Well, your ears are unusually clean compared to the rest of you," he offered absently.

He began taking off the second pair of latex gloves. "Your ports look the same as your sister's, clear and uninfected. Congratulations. But I _really_ hope you didn't come for any further surgery, and unless you want an MRI, there's not much else I can do for either of you two."

"You can do MRI here?" Uni asked.

He threw the gloves away. "Yes, I have the equipment. It's pretty standard for any cyberization clinic." Dr. Watanabe frowned at her. "Why do you care?"

Uni had opened her mouth and was about to give a reason when she abruptly shut it and turned for the door. "Hey, Anna! Get over here!" she barked. Dr. Watanabe found it quite strange that they'd resort to such a crude method of communication when they obviously had cybercoms available to them, but he'd seen a lot of strange things just that day, never mind in his professional career.

In a few minutes, Anna was lying flat on her back, stripped down to her lingerie and unarmed, in front of the large magnetic resonance imaging scanner that was in the adjacent room, while Uni stood at the control console next to a wary Dr. Watanabe.

"Expecting lots of tumors?" he asked sarcastically, his voice amplified over a speaker. Neither said anything as he clicked about with the console's operating PC and the scanner hummed to life. He then promptly sat back down in a rolling chair and hung his head back, sighing. _The sooner they get bored, the sooner they'll leave_ , he told himself. He'd even started to ignore the guns they'd brought with them.

Anna, on the other hand, seemed extremely curious about the imaging produced by the scanner, as displayed a the nearby computer monitor she crowded over. She stared at it, unblinking, until the machine announced its completion with cheerful beep.

" _Itadakimasu_ ," he muttered sarcastically before opening his eyes and looking past Anna and at the monitor. He immediately saw something strange and turned to her. "Did you play around with the settings?"

"No," she answered emphatically, still interested in the digital imaging. "So this is what we look like on the inside."

"You didn't change or touch anything?" he repeated, wheeling his chair up to the monitor and staring. The digital representations, clearly that of a woman's skeletal and muscular systems, as well her other internal organs, were displayed next to each other, but each one of them looked extremely strange. Staring at them, he couldn't find the obvious cybernetic grafts or prostheses he was expecting—not that unusual for two young women who were unlikely to reject modern medical implants—but instead found that the color representations overall were unlike anything he'd ever seen. Certain parts of the upper body where the brain case and spinal column would be were clearly distorted, but that was easily explained with an equipment failure. With the mouse, he expanded the last representation further. Uni stood silently as his eyes visibly grew in surprise.

 _The appendix, pancreas, gallbladder, ovaries…where are they? How could she even be alive?_ He looked over the rim at the monitor at Anna, who had sat up in front of the MRI, stretching her arms and arching her back comfortably, before staring back at the image displayed on another monitor. The internal organs the young woman _did_ possess were where you'd expect them, but their shapes seemed warped and different, particularly beneath her thoracic cavity where the differences were especially pronounced. And even her skeletal and muscular systems, which were in the right and place, were all different colors than any other human he'd run the scanner on, an indication that their composition and density were uniformly different.

"This must be some kind of glitch but...what kind of error hides someone's gallbladder?" he demanded at Uni. "Like you even know what a gallbladder is!"

Uni gave him a patronizing look and touched her right index finger against her head. "I know that a gallbladder, or _cholecyst_ , is a small organ that stores bile before releasin' it into the small intestines, and that humans can survive having one removed, call a _cholecystectomy_ ," she countered, her accent still present.

"And what about your _ovaries_? Or your pancreas, smartass?" he retorted before staring again at the monitor. "If you your pancreas removed, where's the prosthesis? What are you, some kind of weird…android? No, that's impossible, even a military model couldn't tolerate the sort of magnetic field an MRI produces. So you must some sort of _shapeshifting alien_!" he snapped, practically shouting now.

"Geeze, hakase, cool it or you're gonna' give yourself a stroke. I know you humans are _anal_ and all, but…"

"What do you mean 'us humans'? What the hell are you?" he asked, waving his arms about.

By the time Anna had leisurely gathered her possessions and circled around the glass divider to the control console, her twin had already forced Dr. Watanabe back into his rolling chair and secured him in place with a long length of utility cable attached to a smaller piece of equipment she'd torn off the wall, the actual instrument of which she left sitting on his lap.

Standing in her underwear, Anna cocked her head and looked at him. "What the hell's his problem? You think he'd never seen one of us before."

Uni gave an indifferent shrug.

"Oh, haha, 'One of us', very funny." A look of realization appeared on his face. "Wait…you're bioroids, aren't you!? You're here after G.C.! Son of a bitch, I should have known!" he shouted.

"G.C.?"

"That's why you're here, that's how you looked me up!"

"Actually, we looked you up on the 'Net, in reverse alphabetical order. 'Figured you'd be the least likely to have a patient, then tailed you," Uni corrected him, her eyes narrowing.

"Who's G.C.?" Anna asked.

Almost immediately, Dr. Watanabe seemed to shrink into the chair he was bound in, or at least tried to. Anna's eyes narrowed as her twin's had, giving both women identical cat-like appearances briefly.

"Hakase, what is G.C., and why would we be after it?"

With the doctor remaining quiet, Uni turned to Anna.

"You know, Anna, as I recall there was a pressurized storage cooler at the back of the analysis lab tall enough for a person to stand in," Uni said rather rhetorically, her accent briefly muted.

" _Sou-ya, sou-ya!_ With the separate dedicated oxygen and nitrogen feeds," Anna replied with great enthusiasm.

"That's the one," Uni replied cheerfully before, in unison, both sisters leaned towards the shorter doctor and grinned dangerously. They promptly left him to alternately plead and awkwardly suggest there was nothing of interest in the analysis laboratory at the end of the hallway, where the two found a polished stainless steel cylinder lying lengthwise atop an expensive refrigeration system.

"It's definitely a cooler," Anna confirmed, crossing her arms over her chest. "You think opening it might ruin whatever's inside?"

Uni wrapped her knuckles against the cylinder. "Only one way to find out," she announced, before grabbing the nearby handle and giving it a hard yank. There was a loud grinding sound followed by a pneumatic _clunk_ and a long hiss, before the top half of the cylinder lifted up and disappeared in a cloud of very cold, very noisy gas.

Still standing in her underwear, Anna gave a quick shiver before brushing off the layer of ice that had rapidly accumulated on her chest and stomach. "Whatever it is, they're keeping it at below zero degrees," she announced, waving the cloud of gas out of her face.

"Anna, check it out!"

As the cloud spread more evenly across the room and the cylinder came back into view, the two saw a green humanoid figure lying neatly inside the tube, held down by nylon restraints and completely nude. It was a woman, a good bit shorter than either of them, with long, dark brown hair. Visibly pressed underneath her where a number of strange, translucent narrow planes, folded parallel to her, that seemed to vanish above the small of her back, like wings. Her skin, from her forehead to the tips of her toes, was a uniform light green.

"It's a little girl," Anna muttered in wonder.

"She's not that little," Uni corrected her. "She looks like one of them, what do you call them…fairies?"

"Yeah, or a friggin' alien. Little green woman," Anna replied with a laugh. "Look, there's a tag on one of the straps—'Greenpeace Crolis'," she said, reading the English handwriting. "Crolis?"

"Someone misspelled 'Chloris'," Uni offered. "It should be C-H-L-O-R-I-S. Humans are all lousy spellers."

"Or they thought it was too on the nose, what with the little green woman and all," Anna countered, undoing the nylon straps.

"Hey, wait, so we're taking her?" Uni asked, hands behind her back.

"Hell yeah we are! No way she's human if she was surviving in those temperatures, and if she's not, that means she's worth something! I mean, she's green and has wings!"

"So is she some kind of unreleased gynoid model?" Uni asked as Anna lifted the smaller woman up and easily slung her over her shoulder.

"No, too light," Anna confirmed. "She barely weighs more than a human her size ought to. You think she's a bioroid like us?"

"If she is, she's definitely worth somethin'," Uni said contemplatively, before snapping her fingers. "You know who'd pay for her? That Buaku guy, he collects all this kind of crap!"

"Ugh, him," Anna groaned, gathering her weapons and other clothing in a bundle under her other arm. "Yeah, I bet _he_ would pay a bunch for a weird toy like this."

Uni leaned towards the motionless body and sniffed the air around her. "Actually, I think she's some kind of science experiment or somethin'."

"Really?"

Uni nodded. "The air's _really_ clean in this room."

Anna sniffed twice. "You're right, oxygen's off the charts! It didn't look like a clean room though."

Still inspecting their prize, Uni unceremoniously poked Greenpeace Crolis in the right buttock. "You see a label anywhere?"

"Check her feet."

Uni did so, lifting both legs up. "Property of the Critical Science Development Agency, Okayama. Okay, now we _know_ she's worth something."

Anna contemplated the idea for a few seconds. "It _would_ be nice not to have to go back to stripping for a while," she admitted, looking down at her state of undress.

" _Sou-ya, sou-ya_!" Uni chirped, raising a fist in agreement.

Dr. Watanabe was still struggling with his crude restraints when the two passed by him in the hallway, carrying the green girl like she was a large sack of rice.

"Hey! Come back, that's CSDA property!"

"Yeah, we saw the label on her butt," Anna said with a grin to her twin, who grinned back.

"You can't just take her! She's not ours!"

"Tell them we held you at gunpoint, hakase," Uni offered.

"You _did_ hold me at gunpoint!" he shouted, trying to roll after them.

"You really oughta' get better cameras in here. We'll file with our insurance later," Anna explained, barely holding back laughter as she dropped Greenpeace Crolis onto the couch in the lobby and began dressing herself.

"We'll need to get her clothes too," Uni said aloud.

"Yeah, something cute. I want new stuff too, I'm tired of the punk rocker look," Anna replied, pulling on her leather jacket.

"File your insurance," Dr. Watanabe grumbled, gnashing his teeth. "Who the hell are you people even?!"

The late morning sun had begun penetrating the haze of the previous day, filling the lobby with light through a single large window and bathing the couch in warmth. Whether from that or the light itself, with slow, deliberate motions, Greenpeace Crolis sat up on the couch, its wings beginning to twitch and flex very slowly.

"Hey, she's waking up," Uni pointed out. "I guess she isn't dead!"

"Think she can walk?"

"She's too slow anyway," Uni announced, snatching the smaller figure up by the waist and lifting her up with the same ease of her sister, like a large doll.

" _Hey!_ Damn it, stop ignoring me! Who are you people?" Dr. Watanabe shouted, having barely reached the lobby just as they were opening the door.

With their cargo in tow, both women took a look at the rather helpless physician trying to pull himself over to them with his feet, onto to get his chair stuck on the metal divider between the hardwood floor and the carpeted waiting room and simultaneously laughed.

" _We're Annapuma and Unipuma! The bitchin' babes of Niihama's underworld!_ " Anna shouted, making vulgar gestures with her free hands.

" _Tell your loser friends to remember us!_ " Uni added.

With more laughter, they leisurely left through the clinic's front entrance, while the doctor vainly tried to push himself into the lobby without knocking the chair over.

"Damn!" He tried again, only to slide forward abruptly and tip over onto his face. " _Damn_!"

Wriggling his hands around under their improvised binding, he tried to stand himself up, but rolled over instead. " _Damn it all_!"


End file.
